1. Introduction §

For an upcoming privacy related article about OpenBSD I needed to setup an access to an OpenBSD mirror both from a Tor hidden service and I2P.

The server does not contain any data, it only act as a proxy fetch files from a random existing OpenBSD mirror, so it does not waste bandwidth mirroring everything, the server does not have the storage required anyway. There is a little cache to keep most requested files locally.

Wikipedia page about I2P protocol

Wikipedia page about Tor

It is only useful if you can not reach OpenBSD mirrors, or if you really need to hide your network activity. Tor or I2P will be much slower than connecting to a mirror using HTTP(s).

However, as they exist now, let me explain how to start using them.

2. Tor §

Using a client with tor proxy enabled, you can reach the following address to download installers or sets.

OpenBSD onion mirror over Tor

If you want to install or update your packages from tor, you can use the onion address in /etc/installurl. However, it will not work for sysupgrade and syspatch, and you need to export the variable FETCH_CMD="/usr/local/bin/curl -L -s -q -N -x socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050" in your environment to make pkg_* programs able to use the mirror.

To make sysupgrade or syspatch able to use the onion address, you need to have the program torsocks installed, and patch the script to use torsocks:

• sed -i 's,ftp -N,/usr/local/bin/torsocks &,' /usr/sbin/sysupgrade for sysupgrade
• sed -i 's,ftp -N,/usr/local/bin/torsocks &,' /usr/sbin/syspatch for syspatch

These patches will have to be reapplied after each sysupgrade run.

3. I2P §

If you have a client with i2p proxy enabled, you can reach the following address to download installers or sets.

OpenBSD mirror address over I2P

If you want to install or update your packages from i2p, install i2pd with pkg_add i2pd, edit the file /etc/i2pd/i2pd.conf to set notransit = true except if you want to act as an i2p relay (high cpu/bandwidth consumption).

Replace the file /etc/i2pd/tunnels.conf by the following content (or adapt your current tunnels.conf if you configured it earlier):

[MIRROR]
type = client
address = 127.0.0.1
port = 8080
destination = 2st32tfsqjnvnmnmy3e5o5y5hphtgt4b2letuebyv75ohn2w5umq.b32.i2p
destinationport = 8081
keys = mirror.dat

Now, enable and start i2pd with rcctl enable i2pd && rcctl start i2pd.

After a few minutes to let i2pd establish tunnels, you should be able to browse the mirror over i2p using the address http://127.0.0.1:8080/. You can configure the port 8080 to another you prefer by modifying the file tunnels.conf.

You can use the address http://127.0.0.1:8080/pub/OpenBSD/ in /etc/installurl to automatically use the I2P mirror for installing/updating packages, or keeping your system up to date with syspatch/sysupgrade.

Note: from experience the I2P mirror works fine to install packages, but did not play well with fw_update, syspatch and sysupgrade, maybe because they use ftp command that seems to easily drop the connection. Downloading the files locally using a proper HTTP client supporting transfer resume would be better. On the other hand, this issue may be related to the current attack the I2P network is facing as of the time of writing (May 2024).

4. Firmware mirror §

OpenBSD pulls firmware from a different server than the regular mirrors, the address is http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/, the files on this server are signed packages, they can be installed using fw_update $file.

Both i2p and tor hidden service hostname can be reused, you only have to change /pub/OpenBSD/ by /firmware/ to browse the files.

The proxy server does not cache any firmware, it directly proxy to the genuine firmware web server. They are on a separate server for legal matter, it seems to be a grey area.

4.1. Disable firmware.openbsd.org §

For maximum privacy, you need to neutralize firmware.openbsd.org DNS lookup using a hosts entry. This is important because fw_update is automatically used after a system upgrade (as of 2024).

In /etc/hosts add the line:

127.0.0.9 firmware.openbsd.org

The IP in the snippet above is not a mistake, it will avoid fw_update to try to connect to a local web server if any.

4.2. Tor access §

If you use tor, it is complicated to patch fw_update to use torsocks, the best method is to download the firmware manually.

Firmware onion address

4.3. I2P access §

If you use i2p, you can reuse the tunnel configuration described in the I2P section, and pass the full url to fw_update:

# release users
fw_update -p http://127.0.0.1:8080/firmware/$(uname -r)/

# snapshot users
fw_update -p http://127.0.0.1:8080/firmware/snapshots/

Or you can browse the I2P url using an http client with the i2p proxy to download the firmware manually.

Firmware i2p address

5. Conclusion §

There were no method to download OpenBSD files over Tor and I2P for people really needing it, it is now a thing.

If you encounter issues with the service, please let me know.